The coronary artery calcium score (CACS) measures the buildup of calcium on the coronary artery wall and has
been shown to be an important predictor of the risk of coronary artery diseases (CAD). Currently CACS is measured
using CT, though the relatively high cost and high radiation dose has limited its adoption as a routine screening
procedure. Digital Chest Tomosynthesis (DCT), a low dose and low cost alternative to CT, and has been shown to
achieve 90% of sensitivity of CT in lung disease screening. However commercial DCT requires long scanning time
and cannot be adapted for high resolution gated cardiac imaging, necessary for CACS. The stationary DCT system (s-
DCT), developed in our lab, has the potential to significantly shorten the scanning time and enables high resolution
cardiac gated imaging. Here we report the preliminary results of using s-DCT to estimate the CACS. A phantom heart
model was developed and scanned by the s-DCT system and a clinical CT in a phantom model with realistic coronary
calcifications. The adapted fan-beam volume reconstruction (AFVR) method, developed specifically for stationary
tomosynthesis systems, is used to obtain high resolution tomosynthesis images. A trained cardiologist segmented out
the calcifications and the CACS was obtained. We observed a strong correlation between the tomosynthesis derived
CACS and CT CACS (r2 = 0.88). Our results shows s-DCT imaging has the potential to estimate CACS, thus providing
a possible low cost and low dose imaging protocol for screening and monitoring CAD.

Gongting Wu, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)Jiong Wang, Capital Medical Univ. ( China)Marci Potuzko, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)Allison Harman, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)Caleb Pearce, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)

Jing Shan, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)Yueh Z. Lee, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)Otto Zhou, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)Jianping Lu, The Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (United States)